The invention relates to communications systems and methods, and in particular to systems and methods for allowing users to obtain information and services on the World Wide Web (WWW) or the xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d.
Computer users can access many information resources on an expansive international network of computer networks known as the Internet. The WWW is a graphical subnetwork of the Internet. With common xe2x80x9cweb browserxe2x80x9d software such as the NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR and INTERNET EXPLORER browsers, the users can readily access Internet information and services provided by web servers on the WWW.
Computer users can also share a web browsing experience using a collaborative browsing scheme. In one such scheme, users are provided capabilities for collaborative or shared browsing of hypertext markup language (HTML) documents at various uniform resource locators (URLs or website addresses) on the WWW.
Another arrangement utilizes a polling technique in a surrogate for sharing values in a multi-user application, which employs simultaneously viewed documents on the WEB. This arrangement although advantageous in certain applications, requires the surrogate to periodically poll the viewed document to determine if any changes have occurred. Such polling is potentially expensive from the prospective of computation time and, therefore, inefficient. Furthermore, the prior polling arrangement can only be employed when the documents at all user locations are structurally and logically identical, i.e., the collaboration must be symmetrical.
Still another arrangement utilizes so-called event handlers that are inserted into the documents and inform a surrogate that associated form element values have changed. Again, although this prior event handler arrangement functions satisfactorily in many applications, it is also limited to symmetrical collaboration.
More recently, a system has been proposed in which a customer and customer service agent may access to different information when the customer service agent is servicing the customer, i.e., asymmetric browsing. However, this prior system is concerned with the browsing of different versions of information related to the customer. In particular the customer service agent may have access to proprietary information that should not necessarily be made available to the customer.
Problems and limitations of prior known collaborative arrangements are addressed in an asymmetric collaboration arrangement that creates a xe2x80x9cshared Web-topxe2x80x9d, i.e., a work space, in which different in-document applications, for example, within a document page, can run and be shared.
Specifically, in one embodiment of the invention employed in asymmetric collaboration, documents to be collaborated on at different users"" terminals are logically identical but structurally different. Indeed, one of the collaborators, for example, a customer service agent, may have access to information that should not be made available to others of the collaborators. This asymmetric collaboration is realized by assigning a unique logical name to each information entity. Then, changes in the entity captured by some detection technique, for example, the use of document polling or event handlers, are propagated along with the name of the entity to the collaborators, where they are processed only if the relevant named entity exists. If the entity exists the logical name of the entity is mapped into its physical name which, therefore, allows asymmetric collaboration. Consequently, the name-based technique allows the collaborators, e.g., customer and agent, to share changes in the logically common portions of documents, which are structurally different.